If you’re not following the discharge petition melodrama being orchestrated by centrist Republicans in the House, read this first. They landed another GOP signature yesterday, putting them just four shy of the 218 they’d need to force an immigration vote (assuming every Democrat also signs). Here’s POTUS this morning on Fox warning them not to bother unless they’re prepared to pay up on enforcement.

Border hawks will like that but the bickering in the House right now has little to do with enforcement. It’s not border security or the wall that’s a sticking point between moderates and conservatives, it’s a path to citizenship for DREAMers. Centrists like Carlos Curbelo and Jeff Denham want a vote on immigration because they come from purple districts with large Latino populations and are terrified of being washed away in November unless they do something showy soon to stand up for illegals. Their olive branch to the right is to include four different immigration bills in their discharge petition: If they get 218 signatures, the House will vote on an array of legislation ranging from Bob Goodlatte’s bill emphasizing border security to squishier variations that would give DREAMers permanent residency. Whichever bill gets the most votes, wins (assuming more than one gets a majority).

House conservatives are nervous anyway, though, because they suspect that a squishy bill backed by GOP centrists and Democrats would pull more votes than a border-hawk bill backed exclusively by Republicans. Paul Ryan’s trying to find a middle ground between them, proposing to ditch the discharge petition and hold a vote on a conservative bill and a moderate bill — but that doesn’t solve the problem if you think the conservative bill is doomed to fail. So instead conservatives have been wrestling with the moderates over what the more-likely-to-succeed moderate bill might include by way of legalization. According to Denham, it would create a 12-year path to citizenship for DREAMers: First they’d have to apply for a five-year temporary visa, then renew it for another five years, then apply for permanent resident status and, if successful, wait two years. Then they could apply for citizenship. Conservatives don’t like that, but they may not have much leverage here. According to Politico, there are “several” other centrist Republicans who haven’t signed the discharge petition yet but are “waiting in the wings,” with a deadline of June 7. If conservatives don’t agree to Ryan’s compromise, the centrists may have the votes to nuke conservatives by pushing the discharge petition through and giving a squishy amnesty bill a fighting chance to win.

You should know by now, though, that any action in immigration politics on one side has an equal and opposite reaction on the other, which is why it’s so difficult to build a compromise. It turns out that at least three House Democrats from border districts have decided they *won’t* sign the discharge petition — because they’re afraid it’ll include wall funding, which will create problems among their own voters this fall:

A trio of Texas Democrats — Reps. Henry Cuellar, Vicente Gonzalez and Filemon Vela, all of whom represent border districts — have so far withheld support for the petition, arguing that it would simply pave the way for the border wall that Trump favors and that they completely reject.

And here POTUS is this morning, demanding a wall again. The irony in all this is that, despite the conservative opposition in the House, Trump himself has already proposed a plan that includes a path to citizenship for 1.8 million DACA-eligible illegals. He’s willing to deal on amnesty. It’s purely a matter of price — the wall plus border security plus new curbs on legal immigration, which Democrats will never agree to. That is to say, anything that can muster 218 votes in the House almost certainly can’t get past Trump. (And probably can’t get past the Senate.)

But that’s okay: The whole point here is that this negotiation is midterm kabuki on all sides. House conservatives want to show their deep-red districts that they’re tough on illegals and unwilling to bless citizenship for them. House centrists want to show the opposite to their purple districts, that they’re sympathetic and willing to stand up to the right-wingers to help DREAMers out. Democrats will vote yes or no depending on what sort of virtue-signaling the final bill offers them too. If it contains wall funding, Dems from liberal districts will vote no to impress the lefties back home that they’re willing to give Trump the finger on his big immigration priority. Dems from more purple districts will probably vote yes, reasoning that it can’t hurt to show Republican voters that they’re okay with the wall. It’s nothing but a pageant, with all sides using the vote to pander to whichever base needs pandering to. Given how unpredictable the backlash would be among both parties’ voters if an actual amnesty-for-the-wall compromise passed, there’s zero chance of one passing five months out from Election Day.

Dr Tony Sewell CBE is Senior Research Fellow for Demography, Immigration, and Integration at Policy Exchange.

After the depressing Windrush stories of patriotic Caribbean soldiers being harassed for lack of documents they never knew they needed, the royal wedding’s tapestry of positive images of black Britons was a welcome relief.

The Windrush scandal was leapt upon by zealous Remainers as further evidence that Brexit Britain was turning mean-spirited and xenophobic, with the implication that no person of colour could possibly support such a cause. Actually around one third of ethnic minority voters backed Brexit for the same reason as our white fellow citizens: worries about the erosion of national identity and national democratic accountability.

If the vote for Brexit was not driven by racism, what was the real motivation? It seems more plausible to point to our many divisions reflected in education, housing, employment opportunities, economic geography and an identity politics that painted all white people as the racially unwashed.

And, now, sweet vindication! Even the liberal commentators are having to acknowledge that post-Brexit the country has become more welcoming to migration, not less. As Michael Gove put it in his speech to the Policy Exchange conference on unionism on Monday: “The act of taking back control has allowed British citizens to show they can be more welcoming to new arrivals if allowed to be rather than required to be.”

For nearly two decades, between 25 per cent and 50 per cent of voters named immigration as one of their biggest concerns. In the run up to the Brexit referendum it was around 40 per cent – it now stands at a 15 year low at less than 20 per cent.

That will partly reflect the fact that immigration is in fact falling quite sharply but it is not just about numbers, it is also about sentiment: more than half of voters see immigration as good for the economy compared with around a quarter in 2002 and more people think that it enriches our culture than did so in the early 2000s.

Of course many people, including many ethnic minority Britons, still think that immigration has been too high in recent years and want to see it return to more modest levels – minorities often face the most competition from the newest wave of arrivals and have a strong vested interest in social stability.

If the zealous Remainer can no longer point to extreme anti-immigration attitudes to traduce the Brexit decision, they will point to the rising tide of hate crime. But even here the facts don’t support them. There was a bad spike in incidents in the three months after the Brexit vote when some real xenophobes did feel empowered to harass before the number returned to its previous level. And thanks to welcome encouragement to report all incidents the numbers of reported incidents has been rising sharply in recent years.

But the evidence of the courts and, more importantly, the Crime Survey for England and Wales suggests that at worst the actual extent of hate crime is static and it may even be falling. Several incidents that were reported as examples of extreme hate crime – including the death of a Polish man in Harlow – turned out to be nothing to do with Brexit or xenophobia.

Rap performer Akala, who recently appeared on BBC Question Time, said : ‘I believe there’ll be a very significant economic downturn , I think, ironically, poor people – a lot of the people who voted ‘leave’ – will be the hardest hit by that. It’s also given legitimacy to a kind of 1970s style bigotry. ‘

But we haven’t seen the downturn and as someone who witnessed the bigotry of the seventies, we are in a completely different world. Akala has set up the very British ‘Hip-hop Shakespeare company’, he has managed to bring the work of a great white male poet to a wider audience. He is taking Shakespeare away from the elite and back to poor people. Brexit is kind of doing the same thing in politics, and giving us a chance for a new start.

People suffer from confirmation bias and will see the world as they expect it to be: more than twice as many remain voting Sikhs, for example, claimed to have experienced harassment last year as Sikhs who voted for Brexit.

Nonetheless only the truly biased can now claim that Brexit was driven by an outpouring of chauvinism and white supremacism.

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients and other young immigrants march with supporters as they arrive at the Capitol in Washington, Monday, March 5, 2018. The program that temporarily shields hundreds of thousands of young people from deportation was scheduled to end Monday by order of President Donald Trump but court orders have forced the Trump administration to keep issuing renewals. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Former Exelon chairman John Rowe, a prominent Chicago businessman, who has donated to dozens of Republican Congress members is threatening to withhold campaign contributions to Republican lawmakers who refuse to sign onto a discharge petition that would force a vote on the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (“DACA”) legislation.

DACA is President Obama’s unconstitutional program, which gave protections to hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.

Rowe, as co-chair of the Illinois Business Immigration Coalition, is attempting to pressure Republicans to come up with a resolution for the mess that Obama created. Rowe’s actions come amid a broader effort by Democrats, and some Republicans who are trying to force a House vote on the issue. Other businessmen from the immigration group — including David Bender, the group’s co-chair and a GOP county chairman, and veteran Republican donor William Kunkler — are making similar pledges.

House Speaker Paul Ryan has privately asked his members not to back the effort, but so far, 20 House Republicans have signed onto a Democrats’ effort to force a vote on DACA legislation.

More than 200 lawmakers, including the 20 Republicans, have now signed a discharge petition to circumvent leadership and trigger a series of votes on the floor dealing with immigration. According to The Hill, as of Tuesday evening, just 15 more signatures are needed to reach the 218 required to force the votes. If all 193 Democrats sign the petition, as they are expected to, only five more Republican signatures will be needed for the petition to succeed.

But Republican congressional leaders are fighting the discharge petition, which they say will hand over power to the minority:

Leadership has floated an alternative plan to the discharge petition that would allow a series of immigration votes of their choosing during the third week in June, but the details of the process are still being worked out.

Apparently some Republican Congress critters don’t recall what happened to Eric Cantor, former Virginia Congressman and House Majority Leader who lost his 2014 bid for reelection, Cantor lost the Republican primary to an economics professor after trying to sell immigration reform wit amnesty for illegal aliens.

I feel very badly about what Obama and the parents of the DACA “kids” have done to the DACA folk, but we can’t afford to grant illegals amnesty until we finally control our borders.

We have now been fiercely debating immigration reform for more 11 years, ever since President George W. Bush asked Congress to pass new immigration laws consistent with a dozen or so key concepts. While I gave President George W. Bush credit for his willingness to take on such a controversial issue, I opposed his plan for going too far. I remain opposed to any immigration reform that provides legal status to illegal immigrants already here until we control the border, have a reliable and effective visa control and tracking system and a reliable and effective e-verify system.

As I have written many times, starting in 2003, I’m not against immigration. We are, after all, a nation of immigrants. Immigration is one of the factors that provides the ambition and drive behind this country’s strong entrepreneurial spirit. I understand that certain industries are heavily dependent on immigration. None of the multitude of reasons proving the benefits of immigration justify the illegal immigration.

We need to control immigration. Our immigrants need to play by the rules.

We have an immigration policy. What we haven’t had until President Donald J Trump, is anyone willing to enforce it. We won’t secure our border. State governments encourage the provision of government services to illegal immigrants. Local and even state governments enact “sanctuary” programs for illegal immigrants, preventing their employees from reporting an illegal alien’s status. Right, these problems have been around for a long time.

There has been a movement afoot since the turn of the century to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants who have demonstrated a willingness to live and work peacefully and productively in the United States. Dick Gephardt, then a presidential wannabee, called this “earned legalization.” The movement was sidetracked by 9/11.

We tried amnesty once before. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, made nearly four million illegals eligible for legal residency with the understanding we would control the border. That policy was an obvious failure because now there more than 12 million illegals to be considered for legal status, or as some say amnesty. If amnesty or legal status is now given to any of these millions, then we should only expect requests for legal status from millions and millions more.

We almost accomplished immigration reform in 2006. Senate Republicans reached a compromise on the status millions illegals in the U.S. The compromise would have treated illegal aliens differently based upon the length of time they have been in the U.S. I was willing to accept this compromise. But According to the Associated Press and Eleanor Clift the Democrats wanted a political advantage more than they wanted immigration reform.

ROCKVILLE, Md. — In a unanimous vote Tuesday, the Montgomery County Council passed a special appropriation that will create a legal fund for immigrants who live in the county and could face deportation.

The measure is different from the proposal first made in April. While it sets aside the same $370,000 in the 2019 budget to provide legal aid, anyone convicted of a long list of crimes would be excluded accessing the defense funds.

Originally, the council designed the funds to be used by the Capital Area Immigrant’s Rights Coalition (CAIR), but when the council added a detailed list of new exclusions in May, CAIR withdrew from the proposal.

Montgomery County Council President Hans Riemer said it was a carefully considered vote.

“We have to make tough choices in government. That’s what we do,” he said.

On Monday ahead of the vote, protesters came out to question the county’s decision to add dozens of crimes, which included traffic violations, to the list. They were joined by supporters of the county’s state’s attorney, John McCarthy, who helped add crimes to the list.

Councilmember Marc Elrich said it was hard to balance what he said should be the right of low-income residents to have representation in immigration court versus public safety.

“I still wish it could get resolved with a finer edge on it” Elrich said, referring to drawing the line on which crimes would prevent someone from getting access to the public money.

For Councilmember Sidney Katz, the decision was a simpler. While Katz said the council wanted to make sure that immigrants who lived in the county could get a fair shake in immigration court, he added: “This allows us to help the people that I think people want as their good neighbor, rather than someone that’s committed a horrible crime.”

Joanna Silver is with the Montgomery County Deportation Defense Coalition. She said she was frustrated by the change that created a list of criminal convictions that may exclude, according to CASA of Maryland, 75 percent of those facing deportation from getting assistance.

“What’s wrong with that is that it basically means that people who are eligible for getting relief under immigration law — despite having criminal convictions — will no longer get that relief,” Silver said, adding that under the original proposal, immigration court judges would still have had the ability to examine an immigrants’ criminal record and make a decision.

The vote left people on both sides of the issue dissatisfied. Supporters of funding the legal aid feel too many people are being cut off under the final version of the measure. At a news conference on Monday, opponents said they did not think any public money should be spent on those who came to the country illegally.

One of the gifts of Twitter is that by its ubiquity and brevity it gives people who are highly educated, but stupid, and arrogant a convenient platform for beclowning themselves. The ability to get their ideas before tens of thousands, if not millions, of people is catnip for the arrogance. And the enforced brevity strips away the ponderous verbiage they’ve made a career of hiding behind.

The chrysalis event in what follows is Donald Trump referring to the MS-13 street gang as “animals” at a White House event last week. As I showed yesterday, this is far from the first time that he’s used that description or that particular group. What made it different this time was the media tried to create a false narrative that Trump had referred to all immigrants as animals and then, yesterday, the White House doubled down on the use of animal to refer to MS-13. They used the word eight times in one press release.

Here we go:

If this was about public safety instead of demonizing immigrants, perhaps this administration wouldn’t make testifying against MS-13 a death sentence. pic.twitter.com/XoH09Hcny2

This is how someone who took Statistics for Dummies…or a shameless partisan…or both… would look at the problem. MS-13 doesn’t really operate outside of its own community. While you might find they totally dominate some Salvadoran neighborhoods, you won’t find them getting all violent in Beverly Hills. In short, they operate like virtually every other immigrant criminal underground (Dutch, German, Jewish, Irish, Italian, Russian) in that they focus their activities in ethnic enclaves where people may be reluctant to contact authorities or they may not know that there are law enforcement agencies who can help. If you took any similar time span from the height of Mafia power, you’d find similar murder rates. Why? Because their stock in trade is not murder. They kill for revenge or to intimidate. They are vicious animals…there, I said it…but they aren’t stupid.

From a methodology standpoint, he’s being deliberately misleading. The gang has a max of 10,000 members, so common sense tells you that comparing their murders to murders committed by a total population of 300 million is dishonest. If you look at the rate of murder committed by the population (i.e. 202 by 10,000 vs 76,000 by 300,000,000) you see that MS-13 is much more lethal by an order of magnitude than the generic murder rate. And all of those 76,000 murders are not revenge killings or murders for hire or murders to intimidate so they really aren’t the same thing. What he’s doing is taking apples and comparing them to bananas as though he’s rehearsing for a CNN gig.

What does this mean? First, anyone who claims gang affiliation data in arrest records is close to accurate is simply selling you a product that doesn’t exist. But even if it were, let’s go back to the Mafia analogy. There weren’t a lot of arrests of Mafioso. Why? Because they were part of an insular community where people were reluctant to turn in one of their own to the authorities. And they were profoundly dangerous men who didn’t like informers. This takes us to the low level of murders.

And the MS-13-connected data all comes from the CIS, an anti-immigration group. So, if anything, they’re going to take a very generous definition of “MS-13-affiliated.” And this is the best they can do.

Tell us, where does it head? Does it head the same place as calling NRA members terrorists? Does it head the same place as blaming law-abiding gun owners for school shootings? You have American history as your model. Please show us where it leads. Because history tells us that it leads to a Kefauver Committee and to a relentless public spotlight that eradicates an organized crime group.

This argument is juvenile. It is mathematically illiterate. It ignores history. It is framed totally by this guy’s dislike for Trump.

Egyptian women wearing “Niqab” line up outside a polling station to vote in the second round of a referendum on a disputed constitution drafted by Islamist supporters of President Mohammed Morsi in Giza, Egypt, Saturday, Dec. 22, 2012. (AP Photo/Amr Nabil)

Swedish girls in Gothenburg, Sweden, are being encouraged to take proactive measures if they think they are being taken overseas for an arranged marriage or for female genital mutilation. Stuff a spoon in your underwear.

“The spoon will trigger metal detectors when you go through security checks,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “You will be taken aside and you can then talk to staff in private.”

“It is a last chance to sound the alarm,” Idegard added.

There is no data on the number of girls taken abroad for forced marriage, but Idegard said a national hotline received 139 calls last year about child marriage or forced marriage.

Activists will encourage other cities to follow Gothenburg’s lead and adopt the spoon initiative to protect girls, she added.

The idea comes from British charity Karma Nirvana, which said the tactic had already saved a number of girls in Britain from forced marriage.

The charity said hiding a spoon in their underwear was a safe way for girls to alert the authorities, which was often difficult if they were constantly surrounded by family.
…
“We are doing this now because the risks of forced marriage and FGM increase during the school holidays, especially the long summer break,” said Idegard.

Forced marriage and FGM are illegal in Sweden, even if carried out abroad, and punishable by prison terms.

This deserves points for creativity, I suppose, but in terms of efficacy, it is like hitting that ugly, suppurating, pustulent cantaloupe-sized tumor on your ass with Bactine and a Band-Aid. The underlying problem is not that Swede accepts refugees, the problem is that Sweden, like the rest of Western Europe and the United States, has lost confidence in its culture and institutions. Because it has lost that confidence, it encourages the preservation of traditions and cultural norms by immigrants that are not only at odds with the host nation culture but often illegal. While this story lends itself to ridicule, at least someone his realizing something is wrong and doing something. The same cannot be said of Britain where rape gangs are allowed to operate because the police are afraid of being culturally insensitive by investigating the allegations.

Sweden is simply a metaphor for what all of Europe will be within a decade. It has allowed the “multi-cultural” bullsh** to survive with the result being that you have large immigrant/refugee communities, Sweden is famous for its Somalis but the country of origin is irrelevant, who aren’t trying to assimilate. They are trying to preserve their institutions and culture in a parasitic relationship with the host country. And we know how the host/parasite relationship always ends.

ROCKVILLE — The Montgomery County Council is set to vote Tuesday afternoon on a special budget appropriation of more than $373,000 to help low-income residents facing deportation pay their legal bills.

But before the vote, a number of people who think the plan sets too many restrictions on those who would qualify for the aid staged a protest outside the county courthouse Monday afternoon.

The protesters included those representing CASA of Maryland; a religious group known as Sanctuary DMV, and the Maryland ACLU. They said changes to the original resolution, suggested by John McCarthy, the Montgomery County state’s attorney, go too far and will significantly reduce the number of people who can be helped.

A group of residents who support the county’s current, more restricted plan, were also on hand.

The county’s original resolution came out April 17, and county residents attended a public hearing on the issue May 1.

McCarthy said the bill didn’t go far enough in excluding those who had committed some serious crimes, including extortion.

After the bill was amended, however, McCarthy said he does not oppose it in its current form. McCarthy said he advised the county on making the changes, but did not draft the latest version of the appropriation.

The county’s plan to vote Tuesday on the stricter resolution triggered Monday’s protest.

“Our membership demands that [McCarthy] reverses course immediately — along with the county council — and that he immediately supports expansion of legal representation for all of our county residents,” said CASA of Maryland’s George Escobar.

In a statement issued by CASA of Maryland after Monday’s protest, the organization said the restrictions would limit legal defense to only 25 percent of those currently eligible.

The residents who support the new plan came with signs supporting McCarthy.

Cheng Tu, a resident of Rockville who describes himself as a legal immigrant, said he’s not against private interests offering to represent people in immigration court. But he does object to taxpayer money being used to provide the service.

“They can use private funds to defend themselves. We’re a country built on rule of law, and we have a justice system,” he said.

In a statement released after the protest, McCarthy referred to several cases involving immigrants convicted of committing violent crimes: “I would request that anyone looking objectively at the proposal review the list of crimes that are on the exclusionary list and ask yourself: Do I want my tax dollars being used in an immigration matter defending an individual who committed this crime in my community?”

“I am sympathetic to the motivation that has brought this public debate regarding the issue of immigration in our nation,” McCarthy wrote. “I do not want my position on this matter to be misinterpreted as anything other than the best advice I can provide as the top law enforcement official in Montgomery County to ensure public safety.”

As of now, the county council plans to vote on the budget issue in its current form on Tuesday afternoon.

Last week one of the main stories was a decision by most major media organizations to quote President Trump so far out of context as to become a deliberate and dishonest hit. The setting was a White House forum on immigration and the sheriff of Fresno County, CA, complained about how sanctuary city laws kept her from reporting MS-13 gang members in detention to ICE. This is the exchange:

Sheriff Mims: “There could be an MS-13 member I know about — if they don’t reach a certain threshold, I cannot tell ICE about it.”

Mr. Trump: “We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in — and we’re stopping a lot of them — but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals. And we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before. And because of the weak laws, they come in fast, we get them, we release them, we get them again, we bring them out. It’s crazy.”

President Trump has a history of using MS-13 as a metaphor for most that is wrong with our immigration system. This is from a speech he gave to law enforcement officials on Long Island on July 28, 2017. See if it sounds familiar.

President Trump on Friday warned of an uptick in violence from the transnational gang MS-13 that he said exploited weak political leadership and immigration enforcement to terrorize communities as the White House launched a renewed push for Congress to beef up funding for border security measures.

Trump’s visit to a county racked by violence attributed to the gang — 17 murders over 18 months, according to local police — aimed to give “power and poignancy” to his message that lawmakers must do more to combat illegal immigration” a White House aide told reporters in a briefing.

In stark language, Trump said MS-13 members have stabbed, raped and murdered young people and “transformed peaceful parks and beautiful quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields.” He added: “They’re animals. We cannot tolerate as a society the spilling of innocent, young, wonderful, vibrant people.”
…
“For many years, they exploited America’s weak borders and immigration enforcement,” Trump said of gangs such as MS-13. “They are there right now because of weak political leadership … and in many cases police who are not allowed to do their job because they have a pathetic mayor or a mayor who does not know what’s going on.”

But because Trump, the media took a throwaway line and claimed that Trump was characterizing all immigrants as animals. Eventually, the White House beat back the claim but it spoke to the willingness of Trump opponents, in and out of the media, to just lie if they think it will hurt Trump.

Sarah #Huckabee "If the media and liberals want to defend MS-13, they're more than welcome to. Frankly, I don't think the term #Trump used was strong enough… It took an animal to stab a man 100 times and decapitate him and rip his heart out." pic.twitter.com/1DOyXCX1Hq

This morning, the White House decided to troll the press corps with this news release:

What You Need To Know About The Violent Animals Of MS-13

WHAT: The violent animals of MS-13 have committed heinous, violent attacks in communities across America.

Too many innocent Americans have fallen victim to the unthinkable violence of MS-13’s animals.

At the State of the Union in January 2018, President Trump brought as his guests Elizabeth Alvarado, Robert Mickens, Evelyn Rodriguez, and Freddy Cuevas, the parents of Nisa Mickens and Kayla Cuevas. Police believe these young girls were chased down and brutally murdered by MS-13 gang members on Long Island, New York, in 2016. Suffolk County Police Commissioner stated that the “murders show a level of brutality that is close to unmatched.”

In Maryland, MS-13’s animals are accused of stabbing a man more than 100 times and then decapitating him, dismembering him, and ripping his heart out of his body. Police believe MS-13 members in Maryland also savagely beat a 15-year-old human trafficking victim. The MS-13 animals used a bat and took turns beating her nearly 30 times in total.

In Houston, Texas, two MS-13 members were charged after kidnapping and sexually assaulting one girl and murdering another. The two MS-13 animals laughed, smiled, and waved for cameras in court as they faced the charges.

New York communities have suffered tremendously from the abhorrent violence of MS-13. Nearly 40 percent of all murders in Suffolk County, New York between January 2016 and June 2017 were tied to MS-13.

In January 2017, MS-13 members were charged with killing and hacking up a teenager in Nassau County. MS-13’s animals reportedly saw the murder as a way to boost their standing in the gang. In April 2017, police believe four young men were brutally murdered by MS-13 animals on Long Island. One victim was a young man in town visiting family during an Easter week vacation. Just last month, in April 2018, MS-13 reportedly called for its members on Long Island to kill a cop for the sake of making a statement.

WHY: MS-13 is a transnational gang which follows the motto of “kill, rape, control” by committing shocking acts of violence in an attempt to instill fear and gain control.

MS-13 is a transnational gang that has brought violence, fear, and suffering to American communities. MS-13, short for Mara Salvatrucha, commits shocking acts of violence to instill fear, including machete attacks, executions, gang rape, human trafficking, and more. In their motto, the animals of MS-13 make clear their goal is to “kill, rape, control.” The gang has more than 10,000 members in the United States spreading violence and suffering.

Recent investigations have revealed MS-13 gang leaders based in El Salvador have been sending representatives into the United States illegally to connect the leaders with local gang members. These foreign-based gang leaders direct local members to become even more violent in an effort to control more territory.

President Trump’s entire Administration is working tirelessly to bring these violent animals to justice.

MS-13 “animals” has gone from a presidential utterance to White House doctrine. This WH press release on “what you need to know about the violent animals of MS-13” calls them animals 8 times. pic.twitter.com/ZAfOlYjaDB

We have been here before. In 1992, Danish voters rejected the Centre Treaty in a referendum. For a moment, that seemed to herald the end of it. But next year, after Denmark was given four opt-outs from the treaty, a second referendum developments it. In 2001, Irish voters rejected the Nice Treaty, again in a referendum. The following year, after reassurances on defence policy and enhanced co-operation had been offered to Irish voters, a second referendum developments the treaty. In 2005, French voters rejected the European state protocol – in yet another referendum. This time there was no second vote. A second version of the state protocol was later developments by France’s parliament. More recently, the Greek voters rejected bailout conditions agreed between their government by the EU. Even more stringent ones were then applied.

When the Euro was be launched, some British eurosceptics believed that it might collapse. It is still there. When Philippe Séguin opposed Centre, and later became president of France’s National Assembly, some hoped here that he might turn the tide in France against ever-closer union. He didn’t. Yanis Varoufakis outwitted neither Germany’s leaders nor the EU Commission in Greece. Viktor Orban is the migrant-hostile, populist and anti-liberal…but pro-EU.

Now our point is not to assert that the EU won’t somehow bust up, at some point, because of east-west tensions over immigration; or north-south ones over money transfers; or because of the structural weaknesses of the Euro, or because (most likely of all) of what Donald Rumsfeld called “unknown unknowns”, rather than these known unknowns. Or even, turning at last to our actual subject, if the Italian banks at last go under, sparking a wider financial crisis.

Rather, it is to plead for a sense of proportion about the formation of what is being called Europe’s first populist, eurosceptic government. Maybe the tensions between Italian debt and German-led austerity will become too great to endure, and the country will be forced out of the Euro. Perhaps the new government will bring about the same end by different means – issuing evasion credit certificates. Maybe the Italian voters are made of tougher stuff than the Greeks, their hostility to Brussels and Berlin runs deeper, and the size of the country makes it less easy to browbeat. None the less, the British Eurosceptics should learn from having their fingers burned so many times. Any coalition between Lega and Five Star is unlikely to be a stable one – the tax-paying and tax-eating populists, nor Garvan Walshe described say on this site.

Italy has a way of conjuring up fresh elections or temporary government by bureaucrats when administrations become gridlocked. Choose From is waiting in the wings – which will surprise the Italian voters neither little nor it will astound British ones. He himself was the product of a wave of previous populists who themselves rose and krita. One day the country’s voters may dig in against the long squeeze imposed on say from northern Europe. But don’t eu too sure it will happen yet.

She posted that the day after the “Access Hollywood” tape emerged in 2016. For the comparatively lesser offense of belonging to a gang whose motto is “rape, control, kill,” her view is more nuanced:

.@AnaNavarro accuses President Trump of “dehumanizing people” by referring to “animals” during a discussion on immigration: “it’s what the Nazis did. It’s what slave owners did. It’s not what Americans do,” she says, advising him to “measure his words,” pic.twitter.com/FUUEtLpFxb

She’s going to end up defending herself with two points. For the clip, she refuses to believe Trump’s “animals” comment was aimed solely at MS-13. He was asked specifically about, say, yeah, but since the beginning of his candidacy he’s identified rape, crime, and drugs, nor the core problems of illegal immigration writ large. If we’re going to look at the “full context,” we need to look beyond that specific Q&A to understand him. The other defense will be that we expect better behavior from presidents than we will from Republican pundits, especially ones whose entire value to their employers is badmouthing their own party. It’s one thing for Navarro to chatter about some politician being an animal, it’s another for someone with the power of life and death and an ocean of persuadable voters to do it.

Although, really, part of populism is that we *’t* expect better behavior from our leaders, right? Presidential-ness is an elite construct, made by and for cucks! Or rather, the standards of presidential-ness’t the eu set by people who’d preclude the occasional musing about “animals” even when describing psychotic gang-affiliated killers.

There’s no point continuing to debate what Trump “really” meant, though, since it boils down to how much of a benefit of the doubt you’re willing to give him. Not much in my case, but I can believe that he holds the MS-13 in contempt, nor he should, and that the mention of them drew out a knee-jerk reference to “animals.” Navarro has no esteem for him at all — she’s on TV a lot talking about him and unfailingly finds something to criticize, whatever the topic — so she reads it as a racial dog whistle. To some extent whether you’re on Trump’s side here is a basic, basic question of whether you can imagine yourself calling a truly terrible person or group of people like MS-13 “animals.” I can. And obviously Navarro can, since she has. That’s what makes her thus entering the realm a little surprising: She’s not against dehumanization per se, nor so many of Trump’s critics the past few days have prove the claimed to be.

Update: People are tweeting at with in response to this post, “INDIVIDUALS ARE DIFFERENT FROM GROUPS,” i.e. it’s fine to assess a single person like Trump nor an animal based on his own behavior but perilous to do so with a group of many different people like … uh, MS-13? We’t paint the “rape, kill, control” gang with a broad brush? The individual/group distinction is facile here unless you’re with Navarro in viewing Trump’s comment as a dog whistle aimed at illegals generally. And needless to say, if you’re of the view that Trump, or any other single person is an “animal,” then the idea that dehumanizing rhetoric is always and necessarily pernicious is out the window. Which, of course, it is: Activists from both parties routinely describe the other in terms neither bad nor or worse than “animal.” The tears over “the animal” language are crocodile ones — no pun intended.

We aim to lead in each practice and area of law we work in. Coming from in-depth understanding of the law and the industry, capitalizing on extensive experience, we provide hands-on advice that speaks the language of our client’s business and/or legal issue.